Mike Wallace, a professor and historian, has written “Greater Gotham,” which is being published Oct. 2. It is a follow-up to the Pulitzer-winning “Gotham.”CreditCreditElizabeth D. Herman for The New York Times

Man of ‘Gotham’ Returns

“Gotham” — a 1,400-page radical history of New York — was an unlikely hit. Now, 20 years later, Mike Wallace has finished Volume II. And he’s still not done.

Mike Wallace, a professor and historian, has written “Greater Gotham,” which is being published Oct. 2. It is a follow-up to the Pulitzer-winning “Gotham.”CreditCreditElizabeth D. Herman for The New York Times

In 1998, an unlikely tome by two academics became the most popular narrative of New York. The 4.7-pound, 1,424-page doorstop that focused on the city’s first three centuries won the Pulitzer Prize and was instantly hailed as a definitive history.

Now, nearly two decades later, the second installment has arrived, a 4.6-pound sequel written this time without a collaborator. Producing both books (plus teaching and other projects) might have left another 75-year-old historian sapped and hoping for more laurels on which to rest. Instead, Mike Wallace is poised to complete Volumes III and IV.

The endpapers of his “Greater Gotham,” which is being published Oct. 2, epitomize the conflicts that transformed New York City during the first two decades of the 20th Century.

Inside the front cover of Mike Wallace’s magisterial sequel to the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Gotham” is a signature pink-and-mustard Sanborn Insurance Co. map of Lower Manhattan with Wall Street at its core. Inside the back cover is another building-by-building survey, this one of the Lower East Side, then the densest place on the planet.

Sandwiched between the Sanborn maps are 1,196 pages that bristle with a gripping narrative of the competing agendas that defined the two neighborhoods and reverberated from the 19th century to the 20th. “Greater Gotham” traces the historic conflicts amplified by two developments.

First, the mania to curb destructive competition through consolidation, both in corporate America through trusts and monopolies and in government. While Europe was Balkanizing, the city fathers were amalgamating what become the five boroughs into Greater New York. Second, the specter of the First World War was emerging. Debates over immigration and Americanization magnified the perpetual predicament of a wealthy elite symbolized by Wall Street: how to mitigate class conflict to maintain order over a more and more diverse population now sprawling on the newly opened subways.

Exploring the roots and ramification of both trends, “Greater Gotham” elaborates on the message that Professor Wallace, who teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and Edwin G. Burrows of Brooklyn College, an expert on the colonial period, conveyed in “Gotham”: That current events, indeed, occur as part of a current, an ongoing momentum, and that you cannot understand New York today without appreciating the city’s history from a global perspective.

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The endpapers of “Greater Gotham” epitomize the conflicts that transformed New York City during the first two decades of the 20th Century.

Professor Wallace was born in Queens to a bandleader father, spent his early childhood in San Francisco and then returned to New York City and Nassau County as a teenager.

As a graduate student at Columbia, his exposure to the 1968 strikes against the university’s administration and the war in Vietnam transformed him into a radical historian, determined to look beyond the conventional Anglo male version of events.

Even as a radical student of history, a half-century later, at 75, he is rather old-fashioned in some ways. His résumé proudly proclaims “No Twitter, No Facebook, No Webpage.” (He does use email.)

“Gotham,” which embraced nearly three centuries of history, was published in 1998 on the centennial of the city’s consolidation, after 20 years of work.

Since then, Professor Wallace consulted on Ric Burns’s “New York: A Documentary Film” and established the Gotham Center for New York City History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Now, 20 years after the first volume, “Greater Gotham” encompasses the booms and busts from 1898 until the end of World War I.

Nestled in the front parlor of the cozy townhouse in which he lives with his wife, the novelist Carmen Boullosa, on the border of Park Slope, Brooklyn, Professor Wallace ruminated the other day about “Greater Gotham.”

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From left: The floor of the New York Stock Exchange, circa 1918, and street vendors on the Lower East Side in the 1900s.CreditEdwin Levick/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images

You said that “Gotham” and “Greater Gotham” originated back in the mid-1970s. What was their genesis?

In the 1960s, the official mainstream narrative had a pretty benign view of America’s presence in the world. We were in the middle of a historiographical revolution, which was happening in tandem with social movements in the streets by blacks and other groups who wanted to be included in the historical narrative. We were not simply inserting blacks, but repeopling the national perspective. Once you have blacks in the picture, you have racism in the picture. Then, you have women — oops, we left out half the population.

My generation began collectively rewriting the official narrative, but our impact on popular understanding was limited. There was no accessible narrative, one that pulled together all the new research into one coherent overview.

How did that get you to “Gotham”?

Working with Ted Burroughs on a history of American capitalism, we had written hundreds of pages, but had barely gotten out of the 17th century. That’s when we decided to make it more manageable and tell the story through New York City.

How did you divide the volumes chronologically?

“Gotham” ended in 1898 if for no other reason than because we had surpassed the limits of bindery technology. Ted delivered his part, and I just kept going garrulously. “Greater Gotham” was going to go to 1945, to get through the war and reflect the kind of rhythm that repeats itself, boom bust, boom bust, and the busts are often ended by war. This one covers the recovery from the Great Depression of the 1890s to the end of World War I instead.

Was that because those two decades were so transformative?

We entered that war a massive industrial power, but second ranked in terms of finance and trade and as a debtor nation to Europe. Then they started killing each other, and there was this roar of demand for guns and this whole panoply of modern industrial war, and they ran out of money. They sold off their 60 years of holdings in American companies, and then they began borrowing. Britain ends the war still having the empire and the navy, but the United States ends as a creditor country. And New York is poised to become the capital of the capitalist world.

You wrote “Greater Gotham” without a collaborator. What was the biggest difference about writing so big a book solo?

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From left: A crowd gathered at the New York Stock Exchange, circa 1910, and bakers on the Lower East Side around 1900.CreditGetty Images

For one thing there was no one to call at 2 in the morning to say I figured something out.

What’s striking about both books is that the same themes recur.

There are things that are built into the historical structure. It still happens, and it’s almost unnervingly repetitious. You can predict that every 20 years the economy will fall apart: the minks come out of the closet, and then comes collapse, unemployment, homelessness, in some instances political movements demanding federal intervention to support people who are down on their luck. But even in that rhythm, in that oscillation of the economy, things change. In the 1830s, people who were out of work were lazy. By the 1890s depression, it was patently clear that people were being pitched into joblessness through no fault of their own.

Why did the five boroughs merge into Greater New York?

One of the fundamental structural transformations that takes place in this period was the emphasis on consolidation and hatred of competition. For all the big bankers and corporate executives’ putative love of free markets, real capitalists of that era thought competition is lunatic. They have to cut wages, which leads to unionism, which has to be repressed, which leads to socialism. This is an argument that is posed not just as economic, but as morally superior. If you impose order, you’ll eliminate disorder. It’s an advance in civilization. The big bankers and corporate executives consider themselves progressives. And they were instrumental in applying the consolidationalist ethos above all to the city.

Has there been any change in the ambivalence with which the rest of the country viewed New York?

There’s tremendous hostility then because it’s considered to be not really American, it’s full of the wrong kind of people, who are resisting moral imperatives. On the other hand is this glittering attractiveness. I argue that by the end of this period, New York has really become, love it or not, the unofficial capital of the country with street names fulfilling national enterprises: Wall Street is finance, Madison Avenue is advertising, Broadway is theater, the Bowery is poverty.

Isn’t another theme, though, about an elite seeking to establish control over an increasingly diverse population?

The Anglo-Protestant community in New York, which encompasses the upper echelons of the economic order, was definitely in favor of the British side of the war. And they had to confront the fact that the vast majority of New Yorkers were either Germans who were not disposed to war against Germany, or Irish not disposed to do anything positive for Britain, or Jews not disposed to support a Czarist regime busily massacring their colleagues, or a black population, which was divided.

There’s something special about New York; it becomes a cosmopolitan place. The ethnic enclaves in the city are a spectacular development. But they ran up against the grain of the Americanizers, who are saying that you have to pour everyone into the same mold, which is really an Anglo mold and pretending it’s American. And cultural conservatives open up a new front, which is biological, eugenics: not only were we here first, but that we’re a superior breed.

By the end of this period something big has happened: Harlem has become a stronghold. The notion of whites invading Harlem and attempting to burn down churches, which they did in the old days, is preposterous and never more so than after the war.

Is your book a radical history?

Usually, when you’re thinking radical, you’re thinking history from the bottom up. It’s usually seen as a counterbalance to the relentless focus on power and whiteness. But I did my theory work decades ago. From here on in, it’s letting the theory inform, not guide, not dictate. It’s a sensitivity to questions. And one of the questions is, class isn’t the structure, class is something that happens. I don’t think you can do history and call it history and call it radical if you only look at radicals, the downtrodden trodding up.

You need the interaction, you need to understand the appeal of a system, not just that people are bamboozled into behavior that doesn’t work for them, the same way that New York is appealing and appalling to the rest of country, between black and white, haves and have-nots.

Novelists do this better because academics tend to dig tunnels in particular directions, but real life doesn’t work like that. Real life happens all at once.

Did anything you learned change your mind?

That’s a toughie. No, I don’t think so. I had written a 200-page outline down to the 1980s, and that process helped clarify for me the historical forces which have been repetitively operative. There were endless specific instances where things turned out to be more complicated, but to the degree that I’ve been able to allow for complexity, I try to incorporate that into the story and convey it as a narrative. I’m sure this is a matter of provincial New Yorkism, but it’s hard to think of a place on the planet that has evolved into such a complex social organism, with the constellation of cultures, the tremendous disparity of wealth, Wall Street’s efforts to finance what it can’t officially control, and — this is an issue not to moralize but to understand — well, it seemed like New York deserved to have its story told in a way that honored its complexity.

Does your research make you more or less optimistic about the city’s future?

It’s very tricky for a historian. You can get a swelled head and think you know so much about the past, you know about the present, that you can predict the future. If your reference is slavery, it’s hard not to see improvement. If you insert yourself back in 1909 and the debates of the day, you’d be appalled by the cultural assumptions and the arrogance of the people at the top. The disparities are enormous. I tend to think there has been a grindingly slow improvement on a variety of scores, but I also believe that history can go backward.

“Greater Gotham” took 20 years and covers two decades. Does that mean, at that rate, the next volume won’t be published until 2042?

When “Gotham” came out it, a considerable amount of work had been done on the next period. In fact, there’s a fair amount of stuff that’s already been written down to 1945. A lot of what will now be Volume III is done. While it looks like we went into micro-detail and went at a molasses pace, that is a little misleading.